'Iris Murdoch's Use of First-Person Narrative in the Black

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Flinders Academic Commons Archived at the Flinders Academic Commons http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/dspace/ This is the author’s preprint version of this article. This is an electronic version of an article published in English Studies: Gillian Dooley. ‘Iris Murdoch’s Use of First-Person Narrative in The Black Prince.’ English Studies, Vol. 85, no. 2, April 2004, p. 134-146. ENGLISH STUDIES is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/ This article is available online at http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1076/enst.85.2.13 4.30498 Gillian Dooley. ‘Iris Murdoch’s Use of First-Person Narrative in The Black Prince.’ English Studies, Vol. 85, no. 2, April 2004, p. 134-146. Iris Murdoch’s Use of First-Person Narrative in The Black Prince Gillian Dooley Many critics place Iris Murdoch’s first-person novels, narrated by a more or less egotistical and unperceptive male who is also the protagonist, near the summit of her achievement as a novelist – Deborah Johnson says that “they constitute, it will readily be agreed, some of her most distinctive and thoughtful work” (2) – and most agree that The Black Prince (1973) is one of the best, if not the best, of all her works: Bloom includes it in his top four (1); Bove, in her Dictionary of Literary Biography article suggests that “readers who are unfamiliar with Murdoch’s work would do well to begin with The Black Prince … the most critically acclaimed of Murdoch’s novels” (“Iris Murdoch”); and A.N. Wilson, writing after her death in 1999, suggests that “it is possibly the last entirely successful novel she wrote” (80). In a novel like this, which is full of veiled meanings, ironies and mixed messages, how does the reader decide where the truth lies? How can a narrator such as Bradley Pearson, who is patently misguided throughout much of the book’s action, convince us that at the time of writing he has attained true wisdom from his ordeals? And what made Murdoch choose, for the fourth time, to impersonate her protagonist in this “complex and brilliant exploration of the relationship between the author and her male narrator” (Johnson 35)? Romberg calls the narrator’s situation when writing a narrative “the epic situation,” and “in a novel of the first-person ... the epic situation ... belongs to the fiction,” and “can, from the aspect of narrative technique, be an important key to the novel” (33). Further, the narrative technique, whereby the main character himself surveys his eventful life, or describes particularly exciting parts of it, or else lays bare his soul to his friend, gives to the author the opportunity to take advantage of the primitive but remarkably persistent demand that the novel-reader in general makes of a narrative: namely, that it shall give an illusion of reality and truth. The authoritative “I” binds the reader more tightly to the fiction; there is a sort of two-man partnership between reader and narrator, and here we glimpse the primeval 1 epic situation, where someone who has had some experience or other relates this experience to someone else. (58-59) On the other hand, Wallace Martin claims any first-person narrative ... may prove unreliable because it issues from a speaking or writing self addressing someone. This is the condition of discourse, in which, as we know, the possibility of speaking the truth creates the possibility of misunderstanding, misperceiving, and lying, whereas “we cannot question the reliability of third-person narrators” (142). These two statements are not necessarily contradictory, but may refer to different levels of reader response. Romberg’s “illusion of reality and truth” may be the primary, naïve response of a reader – even an experienced reader – whereas the “possibility of misunderstanding, misperceiving and lying” may be inferred by readers on a second or more thoughtful reading, and is often implied with more or less subtlety by the author behind the narrator’s back. In fact, in recent fiction, it is difficult to think of any first-person narrative in which the narrator is the main character, where the narrator can be relied upon to the same extent as a third-person narrator, whether omniscient or not. One interesting reversal of this tendency is Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, where the apparently omniscient and reliable third-person narrator is interrupted at intervals by her own first-person voice, commenting on and criticizing the narrative, exposing its distortions of reality, and laying bare its bias. This technique was perhaps suggested by the third-person novel within the first-person narrative in Doris Lessing’s influential novel The Golden Notebook. However, this reversal only works when the two voices are counterpointed within the same novel, when the apparently objective voice is shown to be in fact subjective, and this has the corollary that the subjective voice becomes the objective, critical and reliable authority. In a sense, this is the opposite of what Murdoch does in The Black Prince. She appears to take full advantage of her readers’ demands for the “illusion of reality and truth” in the novel, only to unsettle and undermine them, not only in the postscripts at the end, but also in the narrator’s addresses to his “dear friend,” P. Loxias which interrupt the narrative from time to time. All first-person narratives contain more than one point of view: the writing “I” is necessarily distinguished from the “I” written about. The temporal distance between the narrating voice and the narrated events is important here. In the diary novel or the epistolary 2 novel there is a close relationship between the epic situation and the narrative, and this may entail an unwittingly ironic betrayal of the narrator’s beliefs. In a novel like The Black Prince, however, written some time after the action, the narrating Bradley Pearson is a transformed character, and is quite aware of the ironies with which his former self is surrounded. He lets the reader know in his preface that a transformation has taken place, but explains frankly that he will “inhabit my past self and, for the ordinary purposes of storytelling, speak only with the apprehension of that time, a time in many ways so different from the present” (xi). The “ordinary purposes of story-telling” prohibit any but the most general hints at the nature of the crisis which precipitated his transformation into “a wiser and more charitable man” (xi). Iris Murdoch does not tend to relinquish the writer’s privilege of maintaining suspense to keep the reader interested. Narrative foreshadowing does appear, but serves rather to heighten the reader’s curiosity, for example, after describing the day before Arnold’s death and his arrest, Bradley continues: “The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings” (317). Thus we have the situation whereby the narrating voice of what Dipple calls “the flayed BP” (113) (referring to the deep mythological basis of the novel in the legend of Apollo’s flaying of Marsyas) is holding back his knowledge of events and his understanding of their meanings, and letting the “unflayed BP” speak, nonetheless hoping “that the light of wisdom falling upon a fool can reveal, together with folly, the austere outline of truth” (xi). Within the world of this fiction, we have little alternative but to trust our narrator when he is describing the course of events, while suspecting his assessments of the significance of these events, and his knowledge of the thoughts and motives of the other characters. This is indeed what he asks of us in the Foreword, when he writes “I have endeavored in what follows to be wisely artful and artfully wise, and to tell the truth as I understand it” (xi). That we should trust this truth – which is the domain only of P. Loxias, the “editor,” and the “flayed” Bradley, is an assumption upon which the novel is founded. Loxias’ postscript, following the postscripts of four of the other characters commenting on the novel and denying its accuracy, draws attention to their self-serving motives; their egotism in each believing Bradley to be motivated by love of themselves, and their self-promotion. In the person of Bradley Pearson, we have both a protagonist acting in a fantasy-ridden and prejudiced manner, and a narrator relating these past 3 events in prison, some years after they happened. He still has perfect recall of letters he wrote and received during this period (including the one from Arnold which he destroys) and he can remember events and conversations accurately, even when he was under severe emotional stress and in some cases deluded when they occurred. The reader’s acceptance of such improbabilities would usually go unnoticed, as they are so large a part of the conventions of first-person writing. Consider the consequences if we allow that Bradley the narrator mis-remembered, or even misrepresented, any of the conversations he reported. For example, if Rachel had not been the prime mover in his abortive romance with her – if the version of events in her postscript is correct – then the very foundations of the novel’s action begin to shake. Part of the reason we are willing to accept Bradley’s version of events is that it is backed up within the text by letters from the main characters, but the main reason is, I believe, Romberg’s “authoritative ‘I’” which “binds the reader more tightly to the fiction.” Murdoch works to unsettle this illusion, but does not destroy it.

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